Re: Flattening Microdata

Ralph, I will back you up.

During my summer work in the NCAR library marking up metadata with RDF 
and schema.org, I came across a couple of "how-to" and "best 
practices" articles stating that schema.org cannot/should not be used 
strictly with the <meta> tag, and certainly not only in the header.

I wanted to do this for one of my case studies, but moved away from it 
(without experimenting) because of these recommendations. In the end, 
the only downfall I saw was that the HTML was less human-readable.

Toni Rosati
NARCCAP User Community Liaison
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
narccap@ucar.edu

On Wed, 8 Aug 2012 11:57:25 -0400
  "LeVan,Ralph" <levan@oclc.org> wrote:
  Evan, could you explain why you want to do this?
  
  
  
  My understanding is that this is discouraged behavior.  Search
engines
  don't trust metadata that isn't visible to users.  The library
community
  got very excited about using meta tags years ago and then discovered
  that they were being ignored.
  
  
  
  Could someone else verify my understanding of the meta tag?
  
  
  
  Thanks!
  
  
  
  Ralph
  
  
  
  Ralph LeVan
  
  Research Scientist
  
  OCLC
  
  
  
From: Sandhaus, Evan [mailto:sandhes@nytimes.com]
  Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2012 11:44 AM
  To: Public Vocabs
  Subject: Flattening Microdata
  
  
  
  Hello all!
  
  
  
  I'm interested in 'flattening' schema.org <http://schema.org/>
  object
  markup into the <head> element using <meta> elements.  In theory one
  should be able to use the "itemref" and "id" attributes to 'flatten'
an
  object hierarchy into a set of metatags - but in practice this leads
to
  unexpected results.
  
  
  
For example:
  
  
  
  Suppose we have a NewsArticle with the headline 'A Test Headline'
that
  has a creator that is a Person that has the name 'Evan S Sandhaus'
and
  the url 'http://sandha.us'.  Here is an example of how to flatten
that
  out in the <head> using id and itemref:
  
  
  
  <html itemid='the_article_id' itemscope
  itemtype='http://schema.org/NewsArticle'>
  
                 <head>
  
                                 <!-- Article properties in global
scope
  -->
  
                                 <meta itemprop='headline' content='A
  Test Headline'/>
  

  
                                 <!-- Author Properties Flattened with
  itemref and ids -->
  
                                 <meta itemprop='creator' itemscope
  itemtype='http://schema.org/Person' itemid='the_creator_id'
  itemref='author_name author_url'/>
  
                                 <meta id='author_name' 
itemprop='name'
  content='Evan S Sandhaus'/>
  
                                 <meta id='author_url' itemprop='url'
  content='http://sandha.us' <http://sandha.us'/> /
<http://sandha.us'/> >
  
  
                 </head>
  
                 <body>
  
                 </body>
  
  </html>
  
  
  
  So that's the theory.
  
  
  
  In practice, however, both the Rich Snippets Tool and the Python
  microdata libraries I'm using locally
  (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/microdata) both insist on adding the
  creator-specific properties to both the scope of both the creator 
and
  the NewsItem.
  
  
  
  More concretely - my local tools give me this:
  
  [{
  
     "id": "the_article_id",
  
     "properties": {
  
         "creator": [{
  
             "id": "the_creator_id",
  
             "properties": {
  
                 "name": ["Evan S Sandhaus"],
  
                 "url": ["http://sandha.us <http://sandha.us/> "]
  
             },
  
             "type": "http://schema.org/Person"
  
         }],
  
         "headline": ["A Test Headline"],
  
         "name": ["Evan S Sandhaus"],
  
         "url": ["http://sandha.us <http://sandha.us/> "]
  
     },
  
     "type": "http://schema.org/NewsItem"
  
  }]
  
  
  
  And the Rich Snippets tool gives me this:
  
  Item
  
  Type: http://schema.org/newsarticle
  headline = A Test Headline
  creator = Item( 1 )
  name = Evan S Sandhaus
  url = http://sandha.us
  
  Item 1
  
  Type: http://schema.org/person
  name = Evan S Sandhaus
  url = http://sandha.us
  
  
  
  So the question is: is this expected behavior?  If so, is there
anything
  I could do besides this to "flatten" the markup into the <head>
element?
  
  
  
  Thanks!
  
  
  
  ~Evan
  
  --
  
  Evan Sandhaus
  
  Lead Architect, Semantic Platforms
  
  The New York Times Company
  
  @kansandhaus

Received on Wednesday, 8 August 2012 22:25:03 UTC